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Digitizing Map Data — QGIS Tutorials and Tips

Digitizing is one of the most common tasks that a GIS Specialist has to do. Often a large amount of GIS time is spent in digitizing raster data to create vector layers that you use in your analysis. QGIS has powerful on-screen digitizing and editing capabilities that we will explore in this tutorial. We will use a raster topographic map and create several vector layers representing features around a park. Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) provides raster topographic maps at 1:50,000 scale for the New Zealand mainland and Chatham Islands. is spent in digitizing raster data to create vector layers that you use in your analysis. QGIS has powerful on-screen digitizing and editing capabilities that we will explore in this tutorial. This is a large raster file and you may notice that when you zoom or pan around the map, the map takes a little time to render the image. QGIS offers a simple solution to make rasters load much faster by using . QGIS creates pre-rendered tiles at different resolutions and these are presented to you instead of the full raster. This makes map navigation snappy and responsive. Right-click the in pixels instead of map units. This will ensure that the snapping distance remains constant regardless of zoom level. Depending on your computer screen resolution, you may choose an appropriate value. Click Now we are ready to start digitizing. We will first create a roads layer and digitize the roads around the park area. Select instead if you prefer. Spatialite is an open database format similar to ESRI’s geodatabase format. Spatialite database is contained within a single file on your hard drive and can contain diferent types of spatial (point, line, polygon) as well as non-spatial layers. This makes is much easier to move it around instead of a bunch of shapefiles. In this tutorial, we are creating a couple of polygon layers and a line layer, so a Spatialite database will be better suited. You can always load a spatialite layer and save it as a shapefile or any other format you want. in the attribute table and assign a unique numeric id automatically to each feature. When creating a GIS layer, you must decide on the attributes that each feature will have. Since this is a roads layer, we will have 2 basic attributes – Name and Class. Enter button. Click on the map canvas to add a new vertex. Add new vertices along the road feature. Once you have digitized a road segment, right-click to end the feature. You can use the scroll wheel of the mouse to zoom in or out while digitizing. You can also hold the scroll button and move the mouse to pan around. is an auto-incrementing field, you will not be able to enter a value manually. Leave it blank and enter the road name as it appears on the topo map. Optionally, assign a Road Class value as well. Click The default style of the new line layer is a thin line. Let’s change it so we can better see the digitized features on the canvas. Right click the Before we digitize remaining roads, it is important to update some other settings that are important to create an error free layer. Go to Once the node tool is activated, click on any feature to show the vertices. Click on any vertex to select it. The vertex will change the color once it is selected. Now you can click and drag your mouse to move the vertex. This is useful when you want to make adjustments after the feature is created. You can also delete a selected vertex by clicking the button and click on the map canvas to add a polygon vertex. Digitize the polygon representing the park. Make sure you snap to the roads vertices so there are no gaps between the park polygons and road lines. Right-click to finish the polygon. Right-click to finish the polygon and enter the attributes. Magically the new polygon is shrunk and snapped exactly to the boundary of the neighboring polygons! This is very useful when digitizing complex boundaries where you need not be very precise and still have topologically correct polygon. Click Digitizing buildings can be a cumbersome task. Also it is difficult to add vertices manually so that the edges are perpendicular and form a rectangle. We will use a plugin called You will notice that some buildings are not vertical. We will need to draw a rectangle at an angle to match the building footprint. Click the tool is activated, you will see crosshairs at the center of the polygon. Click exactly on that crosshairs and drag the mouse while holding the left-click button. A preview of the rotated feature will appear. Let go of the mouse button when the polygon aligns with the building footprint. The digitizing task is now complete. You can play with the styling and labelling options in layer properties to create a nice looking map from the data you created. Source.

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